Tag Archives: Improvisation in the key of…

Today is World Book Day and I’ve been thinking what exactly it is about books – physical, tactile books with pages and binding and weight – that excited me so much as a kid and still does. And also, why that matters and my mixed emotions over digital publishing.

I’ve always been a part-time Luddite, resisting new technology at the same time as coveting it, but by the time I inevitably give in and buy the gadget the rest of the world has moved on. As a writer in the modern world it is impossible not to adopt the use of some technology. Even Joe Hill, who apparently still enjoys the use of a typewriter, is a regular user of Twitter. Yet, I still haven’t bought into using an e-reader of some kind, despite their now huge popularity, even though I agree with the whole saving of space and trees aspect. Something about them still turns me off, and I know I am in the minority these days and given enough time, late night whisky and itchy mouse fingers I may purchase a Kindle and be all born-again digital Messiah. By which point the rest of the world will be consuming their books via Google Glass or direct brain uploads.

The thing is, when I walk into a bookshop, or a library, like the one in the photo above (Barter Books in Alnwick) it’s the very existence of the books that thrills me. Yes, the smell, the feel etc… but also the fact that they exist. When I was four years old I used to sleep in a sectioned-off area of my mum’s bedroom (because we used to rent out the only other bedroom in the flat) that had a wall on the left and a bookshelf on the right. I still have that same bookshelf (shelves bowing and blistering with multiple paint jobs), which towered over me as a child, all six shelves of it, laden with Enid Blyton and Dr Seuss and various books that have now escaped my memory. There was a safety to them. They represented, to me, a literal barrier to the nightmares that would try and invade my sleep.

Whether it’s due to the presence of that bookcase, I don’t know, but I find physical books to be such a valuable commodity. Anyone can pick them up and read them at any time, and given even minimal protection from the elements they should survive an extremely long time. There’s a reverence inherent in people’s behaviour towards large collections of books. Hushed words and soft footsteps, and I understand that. Who wouldn’t be reverent to the time, effort and imagination that has gone into producing those words, or even just the cover artwork design.

I’m not advocating that this is how everyone should behave, and I foresee a time in the very near future when attitudes are going to change irrevocably. The advent of digital publishing has turned books into more of a throwaway commodity. A non-corporeal thing that is gone at the touch of a button (the same could be said for books at the strike of a match, yet somehow one is seen as much more iconoclastic than the other). There are people growing up now who know nothing else but a digital world, and I’m curious to be able to see through their eyes and have a sense of how they perceive books. I don’t believe for a second that this applies to all people half my age or younger, but there has to be a difference of perception there. When I was sleeping in that bed betwixt wall and bookcase, the only technology in our house was perhaps a pocket calculator. TV, radio, fridge, telephones were still operating on technology that hadn’t progressed much since before WWII. I saw the advent of personal computers from their most basic incarnations (ZX spectrum etc…), but I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to grow up in a world where the internet and mobile phones, tablets, PCs, game consoles are an everyday occurrence and taken for granted.

One of my worries is that many things in today’s society are becoming so ephemeral, gadgets replaced by the next gadget within days of release, downloads zipping back and forth, our lives played out on screens, in social media, in virtual existence. Books need to survive as a concrete collection of our gathered wisdom, folly, insecurities, successes, loves, hates and philosophies. They need to stand as a safety barrier holding back the tide of invisible information.

This is fast becoming a sermon, and I don’t intend it to be so. It is a fairly unstructured thought salad, but I felt the need to blog about it (and yes I see the irony inherent after what I’ve just been saying). Perhaps it comes down to the effects of age and hankering after an age when life seemed simpler and less cluttered with ‘noise’. I’m sure many of us go through similar feelings as we get older, quietly terrified of the new world crashing down on us like a wave and everything we valued and treasured being swept away in the tide.

Is it the obvious things: spiders, being buried alive, grinning button-eyed clowns?

Or is it the more abstract terrors like loneliness, suspicious glances from strangers, creeping madness?

With horror films becoming both violently sadistic and jump-out-of-your pants scary to almost nullifying effect, perhaps it’s the more unexpected things that really scare us these days.

For me it’s ‘sudden unexpected faces’. And by that I mean: picture an ordinary winter’s evening. The chill makes every sensation all the more keen and the darkness is that all-encompassing complete night only evident at this time of year. It’s just another evening in your life where horror films only exist on the screen and there is nothing more scary than the blandness of the gas bill. It’s in those moments of simple prosaic comfort when you are at ease and settling in for the night. You turn around to do something utterly mundane like pour a cup of tea and there, pressed up against the window, is a face with dark, bruised cavities for eyes and a knife slash for a mouth, smearing itself against the glass only inches away from you. Its purpose is nothing more than to come after you – to be behind you in the bathroom mirror in the instant you glance away to spit your toothpaste out; to thrust out of the darkness as you stumble to the toilet in the middle of the night; to be there beside you in the bed when you first open your eyes in the morning, only to be gone again a second later.

Its purpose is to be your reflection in the mirror, to make you realise that the thing stalking you has been hiding inside you all this time, and you touch your face and find bony sockets where your eyes once where, and a sewn-up gash for your mouth. You run, screaming inside, but no noise emerges from your torn throat. You run blindly until you find yourself at someone else’s window, peering in while they quietly read a book, unaware of the horror staring at them from outside.

Some will argue with that statement, no doubt. Winter and Summer in this country are generally miserable. They have their positive attributes, but Winter is often bitterly cold, windy, wet, and an interminably long and dark period. Summer has a tendency, in Scotland, to be dreich, humid, overcast, and unbearably disappointing.

There is an argument for Spring. It’s hard to beat the bright optimism that rises like sun out of the freezing fog when the first shoots pierce the earth and promise of the coming days. At what other time of year is there such a riot of floral colour and a feeling of emerging from a long sleep?

Autumn, though, is about harvest, and a certain abandon. The light is achingly beautiful. It’s the final heartbreaking days of a perfect holiday, knowing that it’s all soon to be over and the return to cold grey normality (Winter) is inevitable. Autumn is crackling fires and piles of golden leaves kicked in the air. It’s whisky warming your belly after a hard day’s work; picking fat brambles and staining your hands purple with the juices; making stock with the roast chicken you’ve just devoured, to provide the base for soups for the coming months. It’s about pulling on those friendly jumpers and hats and creating your own warmth in the cooling, sinking sunshine.

Today, it was about working at the Stockbridge Market, helping the lovely Alexis sell her gorgeous jewellery to Sunday-happy strollers in the dappled September sunshine. It was about freshly cooked Paella eaten in the open air (yes, that’s it in the pan in the photo). If you live in Edinburgh and enjoy food, then you should absolutely come to the Market and eat the incredible, varied food and buy the all the pretty things.

Autumn has also always been a fruitful time for writing for me, for some reason. I enjoy the feeling of hunkering down in the house when the weather is inclement, positioned in front of the glowing screen, creating universes with the tips of my fingers.

But nothing beats eating outside at this time of year. Freshly baked bread. Roast meats. Apples. Most people spend the summer barbecuing the life out of poor innocent sausages and burgers, to lie in the sweaty humidity and consume them, because that’s what everyone else does. Crisp Autumn days, such as today, when the sun is brighter, lower in the sky and dazzling, and you can smell the frost in the mornings, are days to cook outside with a ridiculous jumper on. Then you can savour the warmth of the food against the chill air and your taste buds come alive.

Another overcast Sunday afternoon, with the sky the colour of dissolved aspirin and I’m counting the snowdrops in the garden from my bay window. Eight, and one stunted-looking one. I’d thought about giving them names, but will only be sad when they inevitably shrivel up and wilt.

There are a number of light, impermanent things occurring today – along with the snowdrops, the daylight will fade in about three hours time; the honey and sunflower bread baking in the kitchen, will undoubtedly disappear before the end of the day; my cat’s attention span as he focuses with killer instinct on the garden birds flitting about in the drizzle, and then becomes more concerned with cleaning his tail.

It’s the nature of things, I suppose, and it’s hard not to imbue the scene with a sense of melancholy, but all things fade, and then new things come along and replace them. Ho Hum. And after I’ve tapped out this mini-improvisation on the impermanence of life and I have to concentrate on critiquing a friend’s short story and then revise ‘Great Junction Street‘ for the final time and begin the investigation where to submit a grim urban horror story full of coarse Edinburgh dialect.

(…in which I riff on some loosely connected bits in my head without any kind of a plan, conclusion, or even necessarily a point, as an attempt to blog more often…)

I’ve been mostly oblivious to the events taking place today in Egypt – scenes that will be replayed again and again. A peaceful revolution of this sort is the kind of spectacle that inspires and manages to instil some hope that we can all live in harmony, and make a change for the better (even in this oh-so-cynical world).

I overheard someone speaking about visiting Rwanda today, and the charitable mission of their visit to help build schools for the communities there blighted by the sorts of horrors that I can never fully understand, having only seen them through the distancing, safe lens of TV. This person spoke about how it was impossible to appreciate what these people had gone through – living side by side with people who had murdered their friends and family in the 1994 genocide – unless you actually went out there and spoke to them and saw with your own eyes the after-effects.

Hearing about that, and watching the Egyptian ‘revolution’, it’s set me thinking about the way we perceive events from our privileged Western perspective, and the difficulty of separating our own personal, little lives and the bizarrely mundane things we obsess over and work on in our daily lives.

In a tortuous fashion, I wrestle this back to the subject of writing, as this is a blog about writing and not politics, but it has prompted me to write this, stunned as I am by the scenes in Tahrir Square, of the rippling mass of crowd so big it stops being just single people any more. But here I am, just a person, in a city and country where many people (perhaps the majority of, but I don’t want to get into sweeping generalities) are trapped inside their own heads, deep inside their little lives, placing importance on the smallest of things.

The only crowds I witnessed today while at work were the chaotic red and white mob of Welsh rugby supporters invading Edinburgh for a weekend of strangely shaped ball action and alcohol consumption. For the Welsh it’s a huge tradition, and they even have a song about it written by the leek-wielding Max Boyce –

Oh! We went up to the highlands of Scotland,
To the land of the loch and the glen.
And we’ll all bring our wives back a present,
So we can go next time again.

I’ve always been fascinated by the behaviour of crowds, especially when seen from a distance (the aerial camera over Tahrir square), but the feeling of being swept up inside one is incomparable, whether it’s the desperate hell of what happened in Rwanda, the current events in Egypt or the absurd ritual of the rugby. I think more often than not, I’ve found myself on the outside looking in, which, is perhaps why I became a writer – some need to observe and report my findings. Hence my identification with the chap in the picture.

On the subject of writing, I completed my first short story since November last year, which I am tentatively titling ‘Down the Back of Donald’s Couch‘. That’s the first new draft of the year, and I also final drafted and submitted ‘Unpicking the Stitches’, which received one extraordinarily fast rejection of 48 hours and is now somewhere else, where it should be a good while longer before any news returns.

Any good improvisation should really end right at the point it becomes hackneyed or a vehicle for anything resembling a structure…